by Дэн Симмонс
“No,” said the ship’s memory. “There is no record of any farcaster on Old Earth.”
Of course there would be no such record. Old Earth had collapsed into the Big Mistake black hole—or been kidnapped by the Lions and Tigers and Bears—at least a century and a half before the TechnoCore had given the old Hegemony farcaster technology.
But there had been a small but very functional farcaster arch over that river—creek, actually—in western Pennsylvania where Aenea and I had ’cast from God’s Grove four years earlier. And I had seen others in my travels.
“Well,” I said, more to myself than to the idiot comlog AI, “if this isn’t it, we’ll just continue on downriver. Aenea had a reason for launching us where she did.”
I was not so sure. There was no telltale farcaster shimmer under this arch—no glimpse of sunlight or starlight beyond. Just the darkening sky and the black band of forest on the shoreline beyond the lake.
I leaned back and looked up at the arch, shocked to see panels missing, steel ribs showing. The kayak had already passed beneath it and there was no transition, no sudden shift of light and gravity and alien scents. This thing was nothing more than a broken-down old architectural freak that just happened to resemble a…
Everything changed.
One second the kayak and I were bobbing on the windswept Mississippi, heading into the shallow crater lake that had been the city of St. Louis, and the next instant it was night and the little fiberglass boat and I were sliding along a narrow canal between canyons of lighted buildings under a dark skylight half a kilometer or more above my head. “Jesus,” I whispered.
“An ancient messiah figure,” said the comlog. “Religions based on his purported teachings include Christianity, Zen-Christianity, ancient and modern Catholicism, and such Protestant sects as…”
“Shut up,” I said. “Good child mode.” This command had the comlog speak only when spoken to. There were other people boating on this canal, if canal it was. Scores of rowboats and tiny sailboats and other kayaks moved upriver and down. Close by, on riverwalks and esplanades, on skyways crisscrossing above the well-lighted waters, hundreds more walked in pairs and small groups. Stocky individuals in bright garments jogged alone.
I felt the gravity weigh my arms as I tried to lift the kayak paddle—at least half-again Earth’s was my immediate impression—and I slowly lifted my face to the view of those hundreds—thousands—of lighted windows and turrets, walkways and balconies and landing pads, of more lights as chrome-silver trains hummed softly through clear tubes above the river, as EMV’s sliced through the air overhead, as levitation platforms and sky ferries carried people back and forth across this incredible canyon… and I knew.
Lusus. This had to be Lusus.
I had met Lusians before: rich hunters come to Hyperion to shoot ducks or demi-gyres, richer offworld gamblers slumming in the Nine Tails casinos where I had worked as a bouncer, even a few expatriates in our Home Guard unit, felons fleeing Pax justice most likely. They all had the high-g, low-profile look of these short, stocky, prominently muscled joggers who chugged by on the riverwalks and esplanades like some primitive but powerful steam machines. No one seemed to be paying any attention to my kayak or me. This surprised me: from these natives’ perspectives, I must have appeared from nowhere, materializing under the farcaster portal behind me.
I looked back and understood why my appearance might have gone unnoticed. The farcaster portal was old, of course, part of the fallen Hegemony and of the former River Tethys, and the arch had been built into the Hive city walls—platforms and walkways studding and overhanging the slender portal—so that the segment of canal or river directly under the arch was the only visible section of this indoor city that lay in deep shadow. Even as I glanced back, a small motorboat glided out of that shadow, caught the glow of the sodium-vapor lights that overhung the river walkway, and seemed to pop into existence just as I had half a moment earlier.
Bulked up as I was in sweater and jacket, tightly tucked into the nylon skirt of my little kayak cockpit, I probably looked as stocky as the Lusians I saw on either side of me. A man and woman on jet skis waved as they hissed past.
I waved back. “Jesus,” I whispered again, more in prayer than blasphemy. This time the comlog made no comment. I will interrupt myself here. My temptation at this point in the telling, despite the hurry-up incentive of cyanide gas hissing into the Schrödinger cat box at any moment, was to describe my interworld odyssey in great detail. It was, in truth, as close as I had come to true adventure since Aenea and I had arrived at the safety of Old Earth four standard years earlier.
In the thirty-some standard hours since Aenea had peremptorily announced my imminent departure by farcaster, I had naturally assumed that the voyage would be similar to our former trip—from Renaissance Vector to Old Earth, our voyage had been through empty or abandoned landscapes via worlds such as Hebron, New Mecca, God’s Grove, and unnamed worlds such as the jungle planet on which we had left the Consul’s ship in hiding. On one of the few planets where we had encountered inhabitants—ironically on Mare Infinitus, the sparsely settled ocean world—the contact had been catastrophic for everyone involved: I had blown up most of their floating platform; they had captured me, stabbed me, shot me, and almost drowned me. In the process, I had lost some of the most valuable things we had taken on the trip, including the ancient hawking mat that had been handed down since the days of the Siri and Merin legend and the equally ancient .45 caliber handgun that I had wanted to believe once belonged to Aenea’s mother, Brawne Lamia.
But for the majority of our voyage, the River Tethys had carried Aenea, A. Bettik, and me through empty landscapes—ominously empty on Hebron and New Mecca, as if some terror had carried away the populations—and we had been left alone.
Not here. Lusus was alive and seething. For the first time, I understood why these planetary honeycombs were called Hives.
Traveling together through unpopulated regions, the girl, the android, and I had been left to our own devices. Now, alone and essentially unarmed in my little kayak, I found myself waving to Pax police and born-again Lusian priests who strolled by. The canal was no more than thirty meters wide here, concrete and plastic-lined, with no tributaries or hiding places. There were shadows under the bridges and overpasses, just as under the farcaster portal upriver, but river traffic moved through these shadowy places in a constant flow. No place to hide.
For the first time I considered the insanity of farcaster travel. My clothes would be out of place, drawing immediate attention as soon as I stepped out of the kayak. My body type was wrong. My Hyperion-bred dialect would be strange. I had no money, no identity chip, no EMV license or credit cards, no Pax parish papers or place of residence. Stopping the kayak for a minute by a riverside bar—the smell of grilled steak or similar fare wafting out on fans and making me salivate with hunger, the yeast tang hinting of brewery vats and cold beer on the same breeze—I realized that I would almost certainly be arrested two minutes after going into such a place.
People traveled between worlds in the Pax—millionaires mostly, businesspeople and adventurers willing to spend months in cryogenic sleep and years of time-debt traveling by Mercantilus transport between the stars, smug in their cruciform certainty that job and home and family would be waiting in their steady-state Christian universe when they returned—but it was rare, and no one traveled between worlds without money and Pax permission. Two minutes after I sauntered into the café or bar or restaurant or whatever it was, someone would probably call the local police or the Pax military. Their first search would show me crossless—a heathen in a born-again Christian universe.
Licking my lips, my stomach growling, arms weary from fatigue and the extra gravity there, eyes tearing from lack of sleep and deep frustration, I paddled away from the riverside café and continued downriver, hoping that the next farcaster would be nearer rather than far.
And here I resist the temptation to tell of all the
marvelous sights and sounds, the strange people glimpsed and close encounters chanced. I had never been on a world as settled, as crowded, as interior as Lusus, and I could have easily spent a month exploring the bustling Hive I glimpsed from the concrete-channeled river. After six hours traveling downstream in the canal on Lusus, I paddled under the welcomed arch and emerged on Freude, a bustling, heavily populated world that I knew little about and could not even have identified if it had not been for the comlog’s navigational files. Here I finally slept, the kayak hidden in a five-meter-high sewer pipe, me curled up under tendrils of industrial fiberplastic caught in a wire fence. I slept a full standard day and night around on Freude, but there the days were thirty-nine standard hours long and it was only evening of the day I arrived when I found the next arch, less than five klicks downriver, and translated again.
From sunny Freude, populated by Pax citizens in elaborate harlequin fabrics and bright capes, the river took me to Nevermore with its brooding villages carved into rock and its stone castles perched on canyon sides under perpetually gloomy skies. At night on Nevermore, comets streaked the heavens and crowlike flying creatures—more giant bats than birds—flapped leathery wings low above the river and blotted out the comets’ glow with their black bodies. I was hailed by commercial rafters there, and hailed them back, all the while paddling away toward a stretch of white water that almost flipped my kayak and certainly taxed all of my fledgling kayaker’s skills. Sirens were hooting from the gimlet-eyed castles on Nevermore when I paddled furiously under the next farcaster portal and found myself sweltering in the desert sunshine of a busy little world the comlog told me was called Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. I had never heard of it, not even in the old Hegemony-era atlases that Grandam had kept in her travel caravan, and which I had crept in to study by glow wand whenever I could.
The River Tethys had taken Aenea, A. Bettik, and me through desert planets on the way out to Old Earth, but these had been the oddly empty worlds of Hebron and New Mecca—their deserts devoid of life, their cities abandoned. But here on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, adobe-style houses huddled by the river’s edge, and every klick or so I would encounter a levy or lock where most of the water was being siphoned away for irrigation to the green fields that followed the river’s course. Luckily the river served as the main street and central highway here, and I had emerged from the ancient farcaster arch’s shadow in the lee of a massive barge, so I continued paddling blandly on in the midst of bustling river traffic—skiffs, rafts, barges, tugs, electric powerboats, house boats, and even the occasional EM levitation barge moving three or four meters above the river’s surface.
The gravity was light here, probably less than two thirds of Old Earth’s or Hyperion’s, and at times I thought that my paddle strokes were going to lift the kayak and me right out of the water. But if the gravity was light, the light—sunlight—as heavy on me as a giant, sweaty palm. Within half an hour of paddling, I had depleted the last of my second water bottle and knew that I would have to set in to find a drink. One would think on a world of lesser gravity that the denizens would be beanpoles—the vertical antithesis of the Lusian barrel shape—but most of the men, women, and children I saw in the busy lanes and towpaths along the river were almost as short and stocky as Lusians. Their clothing was as bright as the harlequin motley on the residents of Freude, but here each person wore a single brilliant hue—tight bodysuits of head-to-toe crimson, cloaks and capes of intense cerulean, gowns and suits of eye-piercing emerald with elaborate emerald hats and scarves, flowing trains of yellow chiffon and bright amber turbans. I realized that the doors and shutters of the adobe homes, shops, and inns were also painted in these distinctive colors and wondered what the significance might be—caste? Political preference? Social or economic status? Some sort of kinship signal? Whatever it was, I would not blend in when I went ashore to find a drink, dressed as I was all in dull khaki and weathered cotton. But it was either put ashore or die of thirst. Just past one of the many self-serve locks, I paddled to a pier, tied my bobbing kayak in place as a heavy barge exited the lock behind me, and walked toward a circular wood-and-adobe structure that I hoped was an artesian well. I had seen several of the women in saffron robes carrying what may have been water jugs from the thing, so I felt fairly safe in my guess as to function. What I had no confidence in was the odds that I could draw water there myself without violating some law, coda, caste rule, religious commandment, or local custom.
I had seen no visible Pax presence on the towpath or lanes—neither the black of priest nor the red and black of the standardized Pax police uniform—but that meant little. There were very few worlds, even in the Outback where the comlog informed me that Vitus-Gray-Balianus B lay, where the Pax did not have some definitive presence. I had covertly slipped the scabbard with my hunting knife from pack to back pocket under my vest, and my only plan was to use the blade to bluster an exit back to my boat if a mob formed. If Pax police arrived, with stunners or flechette pistols, my journey would be over.
It would soon be over—at least for a while—for vastly different reasons, but I had no warning—except for a backache that had been with me since before leaving Lusus—of that as I diffidently approached the well, if well it was.
It was a well.
No one reacted to my tall build or drab colors. No one—not even the children dressed in brilliant red and bright blue who paused in their game to give me a glance and then look away—interfered or seemed to notice the obvious stranger in their midst. As I drank deeply and then refilled both water bottles, I had the impression—from what source I do not know—that the inhabitants of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, or at least of this village along this stretch of the long-abandoned River Tethys farcaster-way, were simply too polite to point and stare or ask me my business. My feeling at that moment, as I capped the second bottle and turned to return to my kayak, was that a three-headed mutant alien or—to speak in the realm of the more real bizarre—that the Shrike itself could have drunk from that artesian well on that pleasant desert afternoon and not have been accosted or questioned by the citizens.
I had taken three steps on the dusty lane when the pain struck. First I doubled over, gasping in pain, unable to take a breath, and then I went to one knee, then onto my side. I curled up in agony. I would have screamed if the terrible pain had allowed me the breath and energy.
It did not. Gasping like a river fish tossed to this dusty bank, I curled tighter in a fetal position and rode waves of agony. I should say here that I was not a total stranger to pain and discomfort. When I was in the Home Guard, a study by the Hyperion military showed that most of the conscripts sent south to fight the Ice Claw rebels had little stomach for pain.
The city folks of the northern Aquila cities and the fancier Nine Tails towns had rarely, if ever, experienced any pain that they couldn’t banish by popping a pill or dialing up an autosurgeon or driving to their nearest doc-in-the-box.
As a shepherd and country boy, I had a bit more experience with tolerating pain: accidental knife cuts, a broken foot from a pakbrid stepping on me, bruises and contusions from falls far out in rock country, a concussion once while wrestling in the caravan rendezvous, boils from riding, even the fat lips and black eyes from campfire brawls during the Men’s Convocation.
And on the Iceshelf I had been hurt three times—twice cut from shrapnel after white mines had killed buddies, once lanced from a long-range sniper—that final wound serious enough to bring in a priest who all but demanded that I accept the cruciform before it was too late.
But I had never experienced pain like this.
Moaning, gasping, the polite citizenry finally falling back from this flopping apparition and being forced to take notice of the stranger, I lifted my wrist and demanded that the comlog tell me what was happening to me. It did not answer. Between waves of unbearable pain, I asked again. Still no answer. Then I remembered that I had the damn thing in good child mode. I called it by name and repeated the query.
“May I activate the dormant biosensor function, M. Endymion?” asked the idiot AI.
I had not known that the device had a biosensor function, dormant or otherwise. I made a rude noise of assent and doubled into a tighter fetal curl. It felt as if someone had stabbed me in the upper back and was twisting the hooked blade. Pain poured through me like current through a hot wire. I vomited into the dust. A beautiful woman in pure white robes took another step back and lifted one white sandal. “What is it?” I gasped again in the briefest of intervals between the stabbing pains. “What’s happening?” I demanded of the comlog. With my other hand, I felt my back, seeking out blood or an entrance wound. I expected to find an arrow or spear, but there was nothing.
“You are going into shock, M. Endymion,” said the lobotomized bit of the Consul ship’s AI. “Blood pressure, skin resistance, heart rate, and atropin count all support this.”
“Why?” I said again and drew the single syllable out into a long moan as the pain rolled from my back out and through my entire body. I retched again. My stomach was empty but the vomiting continued. The brightly clad citizens stayed their distance, never drawing into a curious crowd, never showing the bad manners of staring or murmuring, but obviously tarrying in their rounds.
“What’s wrong?” I gasped again, trying to whisper to the comlog bracelet. “What would cause this?”
“Gunshot,” returned the tiny, tinny voice. “Stab wound. Spear, knife, arrow, throwing dart. Energy weapon wound. Lance, laser, omega knife, pulse blade. Concentrated flechette strike. Perhaps a long, thin needle inserted through the upper kidney, liver, and spleen.”
Writhing in pain, I felt my back again, pulling my own knife scabbard out and casting it away. The outer vest and shirt under it felt unburned or blasted. No sharp objects protruded from my flesh.
The pain burned its way through me again and I moaned aloud. I had not done that when the sniper had lanced me on the Iceshelf or when Uncle Vanya’s ’brid had broken my foot.
